What is it that they say about criminals returning to the scene of the crime?
That would be Stewart Rhodes, the white supremacist Oath Keepers militia leader who led an attack on the Capitol four years ago scarfing doughnuts inside the Longworth House Office Building. He’s the one with the eye patch, since he dropped a loaded handgun while teaching a gun safety course and shot out his eye in 1993. The other dude is Ivan Raiklin, the self-styled “Secretary of Retribution” for Trump, who flogged nonsensical theories about Mike Pence’s ability to discard electoral votes at will.
Within hours of taking the oath of office Monday, President Trump had already pardoned almost 1,600 participants in the Capitol Riot, many of whom assaulted police officers. Among those were members of the white supremacist Proud Boys gang, several of whom were convicted of seditious conspiracy. But Rhodes and his fellow Oath Keepers only received a commutation.
Perhaps this is because the Oath Keepers stashed a huge cache of weapons at a Comfort Inn in Arlington and hoped that Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act as they marched in military formation on the Capitol. Perhaps it was because they were uniquely careless about their communications.
At his trial in 2022, prosecutors played a recording of Rhodes saying, “My only regret is they should have brought rifles. We should have brought rifles. We could have fixed it right then and there. I’d hang fucking Pelosi from the lamppost.”
Rhodes got 18 years, but walked out of jail on Tuesday and made a beeline for Congress. According to The Hill’s Emily Brooks, Rhodes and Raiklin were there to lobby Republican Rep. Gus Bilirakis for a pardon for Jeremy Brown, an Oath Keeper from Florida currently serving an 87-month sentence for possession of unregistered guns and explosive and retention of a government document. (He seems nice.)
Rhodes’s presence at the scene of the crime did not go unnoticed. One unnamed staffer called it “disrespectful” and urged him to “please tell your story elsewhere.” And it did not amuse Judge Amit Mehta, who sentence Rhodes and his co-conspirators and previously described the prospect of a pardon for them “frightening to anyone who cares about democracy in this country.”
This morning, Judge Mehta issued an order sua sponte amending the conditions of release for Rhodes and his fellow Oath Keepers Kelly Meggs, Kenneth Harrelson, Jessica Watkins, Roberto Minuta, Edward Vallejo, David Moerchel, and Joseph Hacket. Because their sentences were commuted, rather than pardoned, they remain under supervision of the court. And so Judge Mehta is able to bar them from entering the Capitol complex or surrounding area without permission of the court. Presumably Trump will remedy this oversight shortly.
In the meantime, former Capitol Cop Michael Fanone put it more succinctly.
And, lo! Even as we were typing, the Justice Department was hopping to the defense of these saintly patriots. In a motion to dismiss the terms of supervised release, the government demands that Judge Mehta rescind his order.
As the terms of supervised release and probation are included in the “sentences” of the defendants, the Court may not modify the terms of supervised release; the term is no longer active by effect of the Executive Order. See United States v. Haymond, 588 U.S. 634, 648 (2019) (Supreme Court has acknowledged “that an accused’s final sentence includes any supervised release sentence he may receive” and therefore “supervised release punishments arise from and are treat[ed] as part of the penalty for the initial offense”) (cleaned up)).
The motion was signed by Ed Martin, the interim US Attorney for DC. Martin is a conservative activist and a a prominent member of the “Stop the Steal” movement who gave a speech at the Ellipse on January 6 and tweeted “Like Mardi Gras in DC today: love, faith and joy. Ignore #FakeNews” at 2:57 p.m., after rioters had breached both the House and Senate Chambers.
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.